Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The more you learn, the less you fear.”

— Julian Barnes

2. “In life, every ending is just the start of another story.”

— Julian Barnes

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

— Julian Barnes

4. “Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy.”

— Julian Barnes

5. “The more you learn, the less you fear. “Learn” not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.”

— Julian Barnes

6. “We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.”

— Julian Barnes

7. “The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.”

— Julian Barnes

8. “History isn’t what happened, history is just what historians tell us.”

— Julian Barnes

9. “I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.”

— Julian Barnes

10. “And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.”

— Julian Barnes

11. “This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.”

— Julian Barnes

12. “Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.”

— Julian Barnes

13. “Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.”

— Julian Barnes

14. “Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.”

— Julian Barnes

15. “We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history – even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?”

— Julian Barnes

16. “It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

— Julian Barnes

17. “Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for?”

— Julian Barnes

18. “You get towards the end of life – no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?”

— Julian Barnes

19. “That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”

— Julian Barnes

20. “If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that’s what caused me to be like this, it’s not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.”

— Julian Barnes

21. “Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.”

— Julian Barnes

22. “And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse – a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred – about my whole life.”

— Julian Barnes

23. “Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.”

— Julian Barnes

24. “Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.”

— Julian Barnes

25. “The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.”

— Julian Barnes

26. “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”

— Julian Barnes

27. “Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.”

— Julian Barnes

28. “There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.”

— Julian Barnes

29. “You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...”

— Julian Barnes

30. “Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.”

— Julian Barnes

31. “History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.”

— Julian Barnes

32. “Perhaps love is essential because it’s unnecessary.”

— Julian Barnes

33. “I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.”

— Julian Barnes

34. “May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.”

— Julian Barnes

35. “Irony – The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.”

— Julian Barnes

36. “I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.”

— Julian Barnes

37. “Every love story is a potential grief story.”

— Julian Barnes

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

38. “Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.”

— Julian Barnes

39. “One of the troubles is this: the heart isn’t heart-shaped.”

— Julian Barnes

40. “Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.”

— Julian Barnes

41. “I dreamt that I woke up. It’s the oldest dream of all, and I’ve just had it.”

— Julian Barnes

42. “Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.”

— Julian Barnes

43. “I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.”

— Julian Barnes

44. “Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

— Julian Barnes

45. “How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.”

— Julian Barnes

46. “Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn’t life’s business to reward merit, why should it be life’s business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?”

— Julian Barnes

47. “I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.”

— Julian Barnes

48. “I am death-fearing. I don’t think I’m morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!”

— Julian Barnes

49. “First love fixes a life forever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.”

— Julian Barnes

50. “The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”

— Julian Barnes